The Eva and the Unicorn
by Laryna6
Summary: Buying UCBerkeley memorabilia is a little more complicated when you arrive at your alma mater to find it underwater. Merlin discovers that the Pattern and the Logrus decided to take their annoyance at his defiance out on Shadow Earth. And now the giant robot is setting off his Detect Relative spell. Everyone knows King Oberon really got around, but did he really go that far?
1. Chapter 1

_Dogbertcarroll wrote the 400__th__ review of my fic Uchibi Sasuke, and I sometimes thank reviewers by writing kiriban giftfics._

_The request was for a _Chronicles of Amber_ & _Evangelion_ crossover, which just worked better and better the more I thought about it._

_I have only been able to get my hands on one of the short stories published after the tenth book to lead into the third series, sadly, so this may not be compliant with them. I just had my birthday and someone was kind enough to give me a gift card, so _Manna from Heaven _should be arriving in the mail soon. I'll edit this to make it compliant, if I can._

_Also a prequel trilogy about Dworkin and the creation of the Pattern sounds interesting, it's a pity that no one wrote any Amber books after Roger Zelazny died, because of course they would have given the project to Jane Lindskold, who completed some of his other works in progress…_

_I do apologize for my Merlin voice. I should have written this right after I re-read the five books, but I had other projects. It's several decades later?_

* * *

The first time I met him, my father gave me an important piece of Amberite wisdom: never trust a relative. You're better off trusting a complete stranger. With a complete stranger, there's a chance you might be safe.

In hindsight, it's pretty clear that my father's side of the family considered me a little 'special' for not regarding that as self-evident, but I rather prefer my Amber relatives and their tolerance of my youthful folly to my relatives in the Courts of Chaos raising me to be a spell-controlled puppet king.

Still, I have to admit that I still have some nostalgic fondness for Mandor, even if things turned out the way they did, so when I banished him from the Chaos half of Shadow there was maybe a little hope that things would turn out the way they, in fact, did.

It's nice when, every once in a while, one of my attempts to manipulate people actually pans out. It gives me some hope that there's a difference between young, overly-straightforward and stupid. The first two are easier to cure. But being someone whose talents run to magic and computer science in two families, or one family if you go back a ways, of expert manipulators leaves one a little out of one's depth. And then they assassinate everyone ahead of you in the line of succession and make you take the crown, which is tantamount to holding your head underwater.

So I was looking forward to the wedding of Mandor and Aunt Fiona, partially because one of my Hendrake relatives told me that he'd built a shrine to her long before they met and I was planning to let that slip whenever a good opportunity presented itself, but also because trekking over to that end of Shadow, hunting down a wedding gift and joining the festivities would give me some time away from the Courts, which were being as Chaotic as always.

I stopped by Shadow Earth, where I'd gone to college in order to feel a connection to my father, who had spent so much time trapped there, planning to pick up a couple of sweatshirts from my alma mater for them, not to mention something for my fellow alum, Luke, and Coral's daughter.

Except UC Berkeley was underwater.

We're all aware that the Shadows are twisted reflections of Amber and the Courts, and what happens there ripples through Shadow. My father told me of countless Shadows devastated by the Black Road that at first he thought was born of his curse on Eric.

I'd thought that Earth was far enough away from the center of things that it would be mostly unaffected by the conflict between the Pattern and the Logrus, the Serpent and the Unicorn. The conflict that had been going on for eons as those two primal spirits of order and chaos avenged slight after minor slight, treating the rest of us as pawns at best. The conflict that flared up again over the Jewel of Judgment, Coral and, well, me, or my mother's plans for me at least.

After all, lots of my far more ancient and observant relatives had visited Earth over the centuries, and there wasn't any sign of even a Broken Pattern, those reflections of the Pattern more distorted than the ones in Rebma, Tir-na Nog'th and buried far beneath Castle Amber.

It turned out that was because it was buried deep under a brand new city in Japan. I wondered if any of Uncle Benedict's favorite gardens were still intact. I might have wondered why no one had told me that my favorite Shadow was half-destroyed, except they probably figured I had enough on my plate and remembered my tendency to mouth off to the powers that be. The Courts of Chaos were pretty well-prepared for what an irritated Serpent could throw at them in the way of reality-engulfing torrents of absolute chaos, but if I'd known that a world full of people with no idea of the true nature of reality had gotten singled out because the two of them were angry at me for refusing to get with either of their programs, Luke wouldn't have been the only person getting the Blood of Amber all over their primal manifestations. The 'blood on the _Pattern_ was actually lemonade he'd spilled to freak the Pattern out long enough for him to get away(I still wasn't sure: Luke was always far more of an Amberite than I was), but the Logrus definitely wasn't.

If I'd used a trump to get there or just gone wandering through Shadow in search of Berkeley, then I would have been cued in that the scenery had changed. Instead I used the spikard and found myself low and wet.

One more reason to try to wean myself off the habit of relying on that thing, but I don't have a lot of free time to design and hang conventional spells for use anymore. Once I'd managed to get to land and dry off, I felt less embarrassed about calling for Ghostwheel.

In the old days, when I was still figuring out that sentient creation effectively meant I now had a son and needed all the help I could get, getting me out of that kind of situation would have been what he was for, but after finding out that my mother had me just as a useful tool, I started to worry about what my creation thought of me, and fatherhood comes with certain obligations, like not looking like an idiot in front of your kids and not getting kidnapped and imprisoned the instant you've finally managed to reunite with them, before you can do more than have a single conversation.

Alright, so I have a lot of catching up to do in those departments. At least I got myself out of Luke's Crystal Cave faster than my dad escaped my mother's little shrine to him, but then Dara was the master, Jasra only the apprentice.

Ghost is an artificial intelligence that I constructed in a far-off shadow where the laws of physics were amenable to some of the ideas I wanted to play with in his construction. Elements of both the Pattern and the Logrus are present in his circuitry (or what works for circuitry), and he's managed to walk, or rather float (he usually manifests as a ring of light) both of them, although they weren't too happy about this. The Logrus chased him all over the Courts and he had to run to me and hide on my wrist pretending to be Frakir, which in hindsight is incredibly cute.

And he'd already realized that despite his considerable power (he's faced down more than one Spikard wielder) he wasn't a god. Something my Amberite relatives generally took centuries to admit, if they ever did.

They grow up so fast.

* * *

After discovering the truth about the April 30 attempts on my life, I was rather busy for awhile, but eventually I got around to creating a spell to detect relatives and adding it to Frakir. If I'd gotten around to that a little sooner, it would have saved me a heck of a lot of trouble, but Coral's daughter would probably never have been born. I visit them whenever I'm at this end of Shadow, and Luke is definitely much better at fatherhood than I am. He says it's the salesman training.

I was using the phone I'd picked up to look up this website called eBay (lot happened while I was gone, even leaving the apocalypse out of it) to check prices on UC Berkley memorabilia (given the time flows, I figured I should pick up the next birthday present around now, and she was old enough that she should be thinking about slipping off to some Shadow to go to college herself, even if she wasn't young enough anymore to be fascinated by stories about where her two dads met and how long it took Merle to figure out that Luke was trying to kill him).

I did notice that the streets were a bit on the deserted side, but I'd never been to Japan, and most of what I knew about it came from the corporate culture (I'd worked on Silicon Valley for awhile, while I was working on the design for my Ghostwheel project) and Benedict's gardens. If it was somewhere else my mind would have jumped right away to 'too quiet,' but most of my attention was taken up by how much of a ripoff the 'Buy It Now' prices were (even assuming I'd missed a _lot _of inflation) and wondering if I could justify staying around for the days it would take some of the auctions to end. I could have had Ghost handle the bidding for me, but presents deserve a personal touch. A little thoughtfulness is important, although spells to control thoughts are definitely going too far.

I wouldn't have cared before (it was just Shadow money) but when it comes to running a kingdom, mishandling money is right up there with saying no to primal entities when it comes to ways to make a hell of a lot of trouble for yourself.

When the giant monster attacked, it wasn't heading for me, so after making sure it wasn't from the Courts (even if it did have the taste of chaos about it) I headed over there, using the touchscreen to enter a bid on a hooded sweatshirt.

Frakir pulsing on my wrist to ask me exactly what I thought I was doing wouldn't have been too surprising.

The Detect Relative spell going off was.

The Detect Relative spell going off because of the giant robot definitely was.

It's far from unusual for someone using my spell to come across a relative they didn't know they had back in Amber. Oberon's philandering was legendary, and rightly so. Given what my father told me about his father, it was like him to stop in on Earth every once in awhile to keep an eye on his wayward children, willingly wayward and otherwise, and even more like the old bastard to sow his wild oats while he was there. If the legend's true that Oberon's mother was the Unicorn (and there's nothing to say it isn't), then spreading the blood of the Pattern might have been in order to keep it from being wiped out by the angry Serpent, even though the blood of Amber can also be used to wound the pattern, as Brand and his son Luke proved.

My first attempt to do a little fiddling with the modern computer systems ended with Ghost saying, "Uh, maybe you should let me handle it, Dad." I consoled myself with the thought that it wasn't just that I was out of practice: there must have been a lot of change over the years I missed. They'd finally succeeding in creating AI, for one thing.

Ghost went off with the lovely ladies three, and I went to pick up my new ID card, with three different organizations convinced that while I was obviously a plant, I was a plant by one of the other ones.

* * *

"You could have told me," I said later that night, sitting in the apartment above a certain other apartment, repast spread out before the three of us.

Julia'd brought the wine. Turned out she'd developed quite the palate while she had access to the Keep of the Four Worlds and its impressive wine cellar.

"I thought you didn't," she started to say archly, before admitting to herself that she was being unfair and swallowing the rest of those words. It's hard to get along with ex-girlfriends when the entire reason the breakup happened was that you were a callow louse and never trusted them, but that just makes making it up to her and trying to mend those bridges even more important. Especially since she and my half-brother Jurt have been going steady for decades now.

I can blame Jurt hating me on Dara, our mutually non-beloved mother, but Julia was entirely my fault. Jasra deciding to try to convince Julia to use me as a human (insofar as that word applies to Amberites, much less Chaosites with our demon forms) sacrifice to obtain power was an effect, not the cause.

Jurt tried much, much harder to kill me, but then his pattern ghost died saving my life. Otherwise, I wouldn't have trusted him when he tried to bury the hatchet somewhere other than in my back awhile later. Ironic that the one who always hated me turned out to be the most trustworthy of my family on Dara's side. Then again, it was that honesty that made him show that he honestly hated me. Someone like Mandor would have pretended to be my best friend.

Jurt and I have always been more alike than we wanted to admit.

"I didn't want to tell you," Julia said, after taking a sip. "There wasn't anything even you could do."

Just like there was nothing Julia could do, for all the power she'd gained from the Way of the Broken Pattern, and all the power she'd given Jurt, by performing the incomplete ritual to transform him into a Living Trump?

"So they've been avoiding the subject around you for this long?" Jurt said, laughing. "You always were slow on the uptake," he added, adjusting the eyepatch.

I had to admit he was right about that: I didn't figure out that Mask was Julia until she was staring me in the face.

The rest of the meal was uneventful. They left after coffee, Julia thanking me for a wonderful evening, and when they trumped out I was left with several dozen yellow roses scattered over the entryway, on top of my shoes.

Say it with flowers.

* * *

Dr. Akagi (a little research had confirmed that she was related to Dr. _Naoko _Akagi – her work had interested me even as an undergraduate, since it was a field definitely related to my interests) didn't seem to be very interested in what I had to say.

The flowers might have been a mistake, but the atmosphere warmed a bit after Maya Ibuki revealed she knew the symbolism of _yellow _roses. I got the impression that Ritsuko Akagi wasn't fond of overly smooth types: one of the few times in my life I've been grateful that I don't have the skills of my father or Mandor.

Grayswandir, the Nightblade, and the Daysword Werewindle were supposedly engraved with sections of the Pattern, one from the beginning and the other from the end. Except, I'd later been told, the two swords predated the Pattern.

And now I was finding similar glyphs in NERV's systems, although since this was a Shadow, who knew how much what they'd found in the environs of the Broken Pattern and Broken Logrus had to do with reality.

It had been a few years – time flows faster in the Courts of Chaos – and far too long since I'd taken any time for research. If the angels – manifestations of chaos, and what was a Broken Logrus doing on _this _end of Shadow – were still attacking the place of my halcyon days of research, irresponsibility and people only trying to assassinate me once a year, then it seemed like a good time to take a vacation.

Meeting Ryoji Kaji told me where Ritsuko and Misato had gotten their dislike of suave men who came bearing flowers. Finally getting in range of Gendo Ikari for my spell to work told me that Shinji'd inherited the blood from his father.

If Gendo had suspected that Shinji wasn't his, that might have explained how he treated the kid.

Inhabitants of Shadows should not try to challenge Amberites to drinking contests. If I'd even started to get a little tipsy, excusing myself to the bathroom and transforming into my Chaos form and back again would have gotten rid of most of it.

Kaji had been trying to find an excuse to chat with me for most of the week. My taking a couple days off midweek to attend the actual wedding couldn't have made things easier – my father had composed a ballad for the occasion, and started jamming with Random and Martin and I'd stayed for a lot more of the afterparty than I'd expected. With the way time flows at different rates between here and Amber, it cut into the time I'd allotted to independent research but I didn't miss work, thank goodness. Ghostwheel and the three lovely AI ladies had promised that no one was going to notice any spellwork I did to reinforce the Evas. All three of them: I might have a bone to pick with the Unicorn, but the New Pattern was a decent fellow, keeping Luke's pattern ghost alive, and Rei was a good kid for a manifestation of the primal force of order.

If I hadn't helped out with magic, Julia and Jurt would have: this Shadow was still Julia's home.

* * *

I certainly don't think Misato believed for a minute that it was a coincidence that I'd ended up in the apartment right above where she was staying with Shinji, and now Asuka. I'm certain she was the one to put Shinji up to baking a cake as a 'welcome to the neighborhood' gift in order to get a chance to look around inside my apartment.

When I saw Shinji looking at the Polly Jackson painting of the snow-bedecked red Camero (thank goodness I'd gone and gotten it out of storage before the storage flooded), I used that as an opening to ask if he was interested in art and pull out my Trumps. He seemed to like the ones Luke had drawn (I'd have to let him know that another cousin of his thought he was a good artist too: it would be a shame if he gave it up just because Jasra thought he didn't have the talent for it and being kings was keeping both of us busy) and he may have noticed that they felt a little cooler than paper and paint normally would, but there weren't any signs of recognition at all. I'd already heard through the grapevine that Gendo hadn't even visited him since Shinji was way, way too young to have survived being taken to walk any of the Patterns. It was _possible _that Gendo might have been in contact with the rest of the family and not recognized me: possible, but not likely, not after my elevation to ruler of half of reality (not that most of the people in those shadows knew the Courts existed, much less considered themselves subjects, any more than Earth paid tribute to King Random back in Amber).

Gendo might not have any idea he wasn't perfectly human. He had a few more years to go before anyone might start to notice that he wasn't aging.

It was a sobering thought: how many people like Shinji and Coral were out there? With no one to tell them they were Amberites, no one to take them to walk the Pattern, to tell them that they could walk through Shadow until they found (or created, as some of them thought in my father's generation) a place where they could be happy? If it weren't for Misato and some of his friends at school, Shinji would have left Shadow Earth in a heartbeat, and I couldn't really blame him.

Sadly for him, I wanted this Shadow to survive, and I wasn't going to put that power in his hands when I couldn't trust that he wasn't going to just wander off into Shadow and abandon piloting.

Never trust a relative.

Of course, I wasn't the only one keeping an eye on Tokyo-3. It was Julia and Nayda that ate most of Shinji's cake, when Luke sent some people down from Kashfa to help put some defenses in place. With Ghostwheel, powering them wasn't an issue. I'm sure that Ghost could have taken care of the entire thing himself, but it was nice to be doing some spellcrafting again, although honestly warding large areas was something I was a little too familiar with, after a certain quantity of Logrus ghosts assaulted my palace during a rather tense little exchange with the Serpent regarding what it calls The Bride of the Jewel and I call my friend Coral, my best friend's wife and the mother of one of my children (the others being Ghost, and Frakir). And also my half-aunt.

After I invented that Detect Relative spell, it seemed like half my aunts and uncles didn't know whether to kiss me or kill me. The ones who weren't hitting themselves asking why they'd never thought of that, anyway.

* * *

"So, what's your angle?" Kaji finally got around to saying after 'just stopping by' and we'd both had a couple of beers. "Who are you working for?"

"Who are you?" I asked, just to see what he'd say.

"All of them. But you're working for none of them. I've made inquiries."

And that would have made people aware that if _Kaji _didn't know who I was with, then I might not be with _any _of the organizations Kaji was spying on.

"There's _a _Merle Corey with a computer science degree, but he was declared dead sometime after Second Impact," he said. "And you're about thirty years too young to be him."

"I'm just here checking up on some relatives," I said, which was pretty obviously the wrong thing to say. I held up a hand to tell him to calm down. "No one's ever called _me _any kind of angel." Although come to think of it, a Fire Angel would make a good demon form. Having two hearts is always useful, when cardiac arrest spells are one of the basics that every competent sorcerer should have in their arsenal. "Shinji. I'm related to Shinji."

"Through Yui Ikari, huh?" he asked, looking as though that made sense to him. I remained silent in the hope that he'd share. "Her background was scrubbed, but there are a lot of hints she's connected to the Committee for Human Instrumentality." Which would make me related to SEELE, the most secretive of the organizations involved in this. And for good reason.

Ghost's lady friends might not want to talk about Gendo Ikari, but he'd passed a lot on to me, which I passed on to Julia. Jurt might not have gotten as much of the power of the Keep of Four Worlds as Brand did, but the ability to teleport made for a dangerous assassin, as he'd nearly demonstrated on Luke and I on Luke's coronation day at the Temple of the Unicorn in Kashfa, no less.

While I'd been trying to keep a couple of ancient spirits of ultimate power and immaturity from tearing apart the universe with their eternal feuding, Julia had been trying to repair a devastated Shadow Earth, coming within a hair's breadth of coming into open conflict with Luke and Jasra again in order to get her hands on the Keep. Not for the fount of power at its heart, but because she'd wanted to study how it maintained the four environments around it. Fortunately or unfortunately, she'd found out that it wouldn't help fix the climate damage caused by Earth's axial tilt being altered by Second Impact before Jasra hired Dalt to do something about the former apprentice who had turned her into a coat rack.

Jasra got better. Thanks to me, although sometimes Luke wasn't all that thankful. At least Jasra was a little better than Dara in that regard. She'd nagged Luke to kill me, but she hadn't put a spell on him to try to force him into it after he decided to knock it off. Still, the two of them loved each other, in their own particular warped way, which was a lot more than I could say for Dara and myself. She was my mother, so perhaps some part of me might always love her, but I wasn't tempted to go talk to her in her prison, much less release her, to try to recapture some relationship that had never been there.

A note on the Black Unicorn, or rather a lot of notes. I think the New Pattern got its taste in music from the man who drew it.

Having two functional patterns strengthens order, which annoys the Serpent, but the fact the New Pattern is not _the _Pattern, Amber's Pattern, _The _Unicorn, and refused to be absorbed and become simply another manifestation of the primal order ticks the Unicorn off too. I'm fairly convinced most of what made both of them stop trying to destroy it was realizing how much it ticks the other one off just by existing. These days, they both keep hoping that it will give them an advantage, either by strengthening order or dividing it, so it's not necessary for it to be constantly guarded anymore and Luke's pattern ghost can go reign in Kashfa temporary when Luke wants a break, and the two Corwins will go off and have jam sessions, or adventures of crucial importance to the survival of all of reality as we know it, or a lot of wine. Or all three.

I call it the Black Unicorn, but half the time it appears to me as a Red Unicorn, probably because of the car in the painting.

Not that it appears to me very often.

Especially not by knocking on the door with its horn while I'm having a few beers with random shadow denizens.

"Is that a unicorn?" Kaji asked, coming up behind me as I stood there in the doorway.

Most of the people of Shadow Earth will just avoid seeing any evidence of magic. That was why I tested Julia the way I did with the cave, not that I realized at the time that I was not just testing her, but setting her up for failure. They don't want to think that they're going mad, so they just don't think about anything that seems implausible when examined too closely. So Julia wanting the truth meant she was aware that there was a truth to be had. Meant she might be aware of magic. Meant she might be connected to the April 30 attempts on my life.

Well, I figured that I'd best let it in to my humble abode, and blue followed black. I have to admit I was a little concerned. After the Pattern made me fix a broken pattern with the Jewel of Judgment by holding Coral hostage, it absorbed that pattern. What other interest could another pattern, even my father's pattern, possibly have in Rei, the manifestation of Earth's Broken Pattern? Then again, this Pattern had always been the nicest of the three, even if my Amberite instincts (stunted, but still present) whispered in the back of my head that since Corwin only had one son, it only had so many potential agents and couldn't afford to alienate us by being as high-handed as either of the others of its kind.

A dog, looking like the kind of stray that had been in too many fights, swaggered in behind Rei. After I closed the door, I gave him a long look. "Really?" I asked, before the actual doorbell rang this time.

"Hey, Merlin," Luke said cheerfully, hefting a black plastic sack over his shoulder. Coral followed, bearing shopping bags and wearing sunglasses to hide the red Jewel Dworkin had replaced one of her eyes with.

"Is that a body in there?" I asked. Luke could have trumped me: had he instead just walked through Tokyo-3 with a body in a bag over his shoulder? Or perhaps the New Pattern had dumped them all in the hall in front of my apartment.

"He's not dead, Merlin," Luke chided me. I didn't feel very chided, not when Luke should remember certain April Thirtieths too. "He tried to grapple with me after I took his gun. I told him to get that hand out of my face or I'd bite it off."

"He tried to grapple with you?" I said, a certain suspicion rising in my chest. Luke and I both carry the Blood of Amber, and that makes us stronger than most of Shadow. Luke used to run with Dalt and his merceneries: if anything, he's much better trained as a fighter than I am, despite all the efforts of one of my Hendrake relations. One of Section Three's security goons wouldn't have lasted long enough for Luke to get off a one-liner.

It turned out it wasn't a body in a bag: it was a sheet that Luke unrolled on my floor. Under the traces of red that came from a broken nose (he'd heal, but I could hope it wouldn't heal cleanly) that was Gendo Ikari. "Should I make sure he doesn't wake up?" I wondered. I actually had a spell hung for that: I'd been using it to cover up some of my prying down in the Geofront.

"Oh, he's down for the count," Luke said confidently. "I said I'd bite him, didn't I? Remember when my mom got you?"

"You're venomous too?" I asked. I hadn't known that Luke had inherited that little trace of Chaos from his mother. "You never told me that."

"It never came up," he said, and I nodded in acknowledgement. When _would _something like that came up?

"I didn't know until I asked why he never bit," Coral told me. I'd have preferred it if she hadn't. It doesn't make me all that happy to know that my half-aunt has been in bed with both me and my half-cousin, and prefers him. When she'd given me that judgment, I'd wanted to protest that she hadn't been fully awake for the one and only time we'd slept together, but that was just reminding both of us that _she hadn't been fully awake_ when I was forced into sleeping with her.

Have I mentioned that I don't like the Pattern all that much?

"I'm not _deadly _poisonous," Luke said with a little grimace, because that took most of the fun out of it. "At least not on Amberites. Tried it out on Dalt when I was about yea high," he said, holding his hand in around the vicinity of his hip.

Seeing my wince, Luke said, "What? No, it was fine. He's the one who dared me."

I considered telling Luke that since he was bigger now, he'd probably have larger venom sacs, but this was Gendo Ikari, so I kept my mouth shut. "So, why is Jurt?" Here and in this shape?

"I got caught on a security camera while I was grabbing the members of SEELE," my brother said, the scruffy dog turning into scruffy relative. It would be the sane thing to prefer the wolf. "Forgot about those."

"SEELE had security cameras?" I asked. From how hard it was for even Ghost to find footage of them in the world's networks, I'd figured they were pretty security obsessed.

"I had to get past their security to teleport out with them," Jurt reminded me. "These days, if it's an unfamiliar location I usually stick to line-of-sight. The Fount should keep me from going into a wall, but I didn't get the full treatment." Thanks to guess who? Not that I was going to apologize, when otherwise I'd be dead.

"You kidnapped SEELE?" I asked him.

"Murdered," he corrected me.

"Surely it would have been the fall that killed them." Since gaining access to the Fount's powers, Jurt has a fondness for teleporting up into midair and dropping people, provided they're not Chaosites and can't just shapeshift into a form that'll manage. If he likes you, he'll catch you. My daughter adores him.

"No, I'm fairly sure it was the lava. In most cases."

"Lava? Why lava?"

"Julia didn't want them on her planet anymore, so I dropped them off back at the Keep."

That was quite a ways through Shadow, but more astute minds than me (Luke and Nayda) don't get why Jurt and Julia aren't married yet either.

"So…" I inquired, pointing at Gendo Ikari. Why wasn't he ash yet, if Jurt was taking out the trash responsible for Second Impact?

"Luke and I ran into each other in his office," Jurt explained. "I said I wasn't teleporting him anywhere but a lava pit, so we ended up walking here. I still don't know why he didn't want to just trump."

"In case there was someone else with Merlin on the other end."

I pointed at Kaji, who was holding up the wall by the balcony along with his beer.

Luke just shrugged. "Got any of that beer left?" I decided that Luke must have done it for another reason and I didn't want to ask. At least not right now: I should do it later. I clearly needed another lesson, although my first guess was that it had something to do with why Rei was with them and giving her time to pet the horsie. Or the other horsie, given that Rei was the avatar of the local Broken Pattern and thus possibly a unicorn herself, but the white giant in the basement looked more humanoid than equine.

* * *

_And I didn't want to put off posting this any longer, given that I've owed it for a long time now._

_I will probably add a second chapter with the Broken Serpent and also Shinji walking the Pattern when I get my short stories and can be sure I'm canon compliant._

_I did yield to the headcanon that Coral conceived, but had the child be female instead of male because so far the Amber books have gone from father to son and if there was a third set of five I _really _wanted Ghostwheel to be the narrator, not Coral's offspring, because I like AI and Ghost is adorable._

_Four thousand words into this, I was tempted to make Julia and Jurt the main _Chronicles of Amber _characters, since they had the most reason to be hanging around Earth and Jurt telefragging SEELE appealed. And Kaji becoming Flora's latest. _

_Shinji actually descends from Oberon both through Gendo and through Yui's father, a member of SEELE: Oberon _really _got around. _


	2. Chapter 2

_Finally got and read the short stories, and the Limited Edition prologue to _Trumps of Doom_. Merlin siccing Frakir on Suhuy to make a point right after walking the Logrus for the first time is very much a 'Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?' moment. _

_For the purposes of this 'verse, I'm going with the theory that a certain serial rapist from 'The Shroudling and the Guisel' is also a lying liar who lies, since she has multiple reasons to try to turn Merlin against Julia, and jealousy is really the least evil of them. It has already been established that, like Merlin, _Julia is not competent to play on that level_, and it costs her. What Rhanda tells us in the story is as ridiculous as someone claiming that Merlin, I mean, _Merlin_, has been hiding plotting skills on Fiona's level this entire time. Several books are spent showing that Julia has not got the skills to attempt something like that, and after what happened she darn well knows it. Even Merlin points this out in the short story. _

_If you look at blood instead of adoption, Jurt's claim to the throne beats Merlin's. Jurt and Merlin deciding to bury the hatchet would have put spokes in a lot of people's wheels, and claiming that the reason that happened in the first place is now trying to turn them against each other? If Merlin buys that, Jurt trying to murder him again eventually is inevitable, one way or another. _

_Interestingly, Zelazny drew on various mythologies for various books (eg the award-winning _Lord of Light), _and the royal family of Amber draws on Norse Mythology. _

_In Norse Myth, there are two versions of Loki: the blood brother to Odin, who gets the Aesir all their fun toys and is involved in all the cool adventures, and the evil traitor of later portrayals, especially once Christian influence trying to turn him into a devil figure becomes a thing. _

_Since you can't really do the Ragnarok story (Corwin is the god Hoder) without Satanexpy!Loki, but he wanted to include the god-of-trolls-but-still-bff!Loki from, you know, basically every single other story in Norse mythology, Zelazny resolved this by splitting the two different versions of Loki into two different characters in each set of five books. _

_In the Corwin books, Random represents the early Loki (fitting name for a god of mischief and chaos) and Brand (redhead, god of chaotic magic) represents the later Loki, the one attempting to bring about Ragnarok. The scene where Random attempts to shoot Eric (who represents Baldur) is a nice touch – Loki's involvement in killing Baldur by shooting him with mistletoe is what would have eventually led to Ragnarok. Of course, Eric is a dick (it's the Corwin books, almost everyone is a dick) and Random fails to kill him, establishing that despite early indications, he's not _that _Loki and not the bad guy of the Corwin books._

_In the Merlin books, there's Luke (even more obvious a name) who starts out as a potential enemy but becomes Merlin's blood brother (most literally when Merlin uses his blood to save Luke's pattern-ghost), versus Mandor (anagram of Random), who seems like a loyal but tricky ally but turns out to be a traitor and very dangerous enemy. The waters are muddied by the fact that Mandor is Merlin's stepbrother and Luke succeeds in shooting Caine… which would have got him in serious trouble if it weren't for Random's wife Vialle, representing Sigyn, who tried to shield Loki from the dripping venom even as it splashed on her arms. Luke's loyal Sigyn is Gail/Nayda. _

_Loki is also known for having a variety of monstrous children: in the Amber books, it's Merlin who has the weird kids. Although come to think of it, being Luke's best friend makes Merlin Odin (he's even getting the crown, not to mention that Odin was the god of rune magic/rule magic, which fits very well with Merlin doing the magitech thing), so this would make Frakir a valkyrie._

* * *

Insanity does not so much run in my family as Hellride while talking to the fairies about how everyone is secretly out to get them. My problem is that I got muses instead of fairies.

For the chosen of the avatar of Order, the Amber side of the family somehow managed to be just as chaotic as the Courts despite being a hundredth the size, before Uncle Random was given the throne. If you believe the story about Dworkin having relations with the Unicorn, then all of my aunts and uncles being one-quarter extremely petty eldritch abomination might have something to do with it.

The most you can say about my relatives in the Courts is that they sometimes mingle their blood with that of demons, which is probably why they've grown less chaotic over the millennia. All the demons I know are very sensible people.

Well, except Nayda sometimes, but love does that to people, or so I've observed. Desperation too, and that I have plenty of experience with.

Anyway, between the father who didn't know I existed, the absent stepfather and the mother who wanted me for something as opposed to wanting _me_, I was mostly raised by demons like Kergma and Glait until I was old enough to start lessons with Uncle Suhuy, and if I was filling out some assessment questionnaire, I would definitely give their babysitting services a ten out of ten and would recommend summoning demons of the Pit as playmates for their kids to all my friends.

In fact, I did offer to summon a few demons to help Luke, Nayda and Coral out with my daughter, but Nayda _is_ a demon (possessing Coral's sister, or rather half-sister – Nayda's father actually is the man Coral's father was married to. Probably, it's not like I've run a paternity test) and Luke, between his crazy dead father and sorceress queen mother, was actually raised by Dalt's mercenaries, and swears by _their _babysitting services. And I do have to admit that Luke turned out amazingly well, when you consider the odds against it. I mean, he only _fatally _sniped one uncle in cold blood, stopped trying to kill me after he realized that I really was just that oblivious and it just wasn't sporting, not to mention that a sorcerer as gullible as he is powerful is a useful resource… I'm working on thinking like an Amberite. Can you tell?

My demon friends taught me the skills to survive the primeval chaos where they dwelled, the combination of daring and goal-focused, straightforward good sense that is vital to survival when everything around you is shifting quicksand and you must be ready to take down whatever it throws at you.

Dalt's mercenaries taught Luke how to swear in the languages of a good dozen shadows, how to cheat at cards, dice and every other game designed to part a sucker from his money, and how to look too cute to kill right up until… no, even after you stabbed someone.

One of these skillsets leaves you better equipped for surviving the politics of Amber and the Courts, so I didn't argue with Luke for all that long. Given how many times Frakir has caught my daughter with her hands in my pockets, I'm fairly proud to say that she's a fast learner.

The line of succession of the throne of the Courts of Chaos didn't remain unclear for all that long. It was obviously the Pattern's intent that I have a child with the Bride of the Jewel, but the Logrus wants that Jewel ripped out of Coral so it can have its eye back. Dara and Mandor, with the fearsome assistance of Aunt Fiona in the background, were intent on getting their hands on my daughter, if they couldn't brainwash me or use Jurt against me, but I pointed out to the High Priest of the Serpent that my first magical creation had been blessed with sentience by the Logrus, conferring as clear a mandate as when the Unicorn itself appeared to give the crown to King Random of Amber.

Of course I was bullshitting at the time (I sometimes manage to prove that I'm my father's son), but the House of Hendrake (my mother excepted) thinks that having a sentient weapon (with the ability to detect danger, too) as heir to the throne is a brilliant idea, not to mention that it was such an odd thing for me to bear with me when I walked the Logrus that it must have been chaotically inspired. And a rope looks kind of like a serpent, I guess.

Which is how my strangling cord became the Crown Princess of Chaos. Well, that and the fact that I have several really hot warrior uncles, and the song 'Never Wed A Hendrake Lass' hasn't made it to this end of Shadow yet, so while going to war with Amber isn't all that unattractive a prospect, killing all of them, including Uncle Gerard, definitely is.

Personally, I absolutely disagree with the song. Aside from my mother (granted, that's a very huge aside…), the black sheep of the family, the House of Hendrake consists of painfully straightforward warrior mages. As a painfully straightforward person myself, it's a wonderful experience to be at a family gathering and realize that _I'm _the person there most likely to backstab someone. I'm fair but certainly not on their level when it comes to physical combat, but I can talk shop about offensive magecraft for days, if you don't mind losing your ears in the course of demonstrations (see Jurt, although he was young and stupid – we of the Courts of Chaos are shapeshifters, normally growing back something like that isn't a problem).

Their power is part of why they can afford to be straightforward people, not to mention that a lot of them descend from my Uncle Benedict, the ur-strategist, the master of all the crafts of war that other tacticians are mere Shadows of.

If you annoy a lass from the Ways of Hendrake, there will be no guessing games: she will straightforwardly inform you what you did and how you had best mend your ways, going forward, unless you want a few feet of straight steel in your gut. I feel they thought a Queen that would respond to treachery by strangling annoying people in order to reduce the surplus population of treacherous bastards was _exactly_ the kind of future leadership the Courts needed.

My second youngest is Ghost, of course. Well, I created Frakir first, but she gained sentience second. We call her the oldest because even if she's the person in the family with the best survival instincts, Ghost and I aren't _completely _devoid of common sense. Just mostly. Frakir is already getting a wristside seat to the day-to-day business of ruling the Courts of Chaos, and sometimes a neckside seat if someone on the Council decides to drone on and ignore the time limit rules on speeches or someone attempts to kill me.

Given that the first person Frakir ever strangled (not fatally, of course) was Suhuy, who is to the Logrus as Dworkin is to the Pattern, one of the great movers and shakers of that which lies underneath our reality, I for one feel very confident about stepping down someday in favor of what Suhuy made the mistake of referring to as 'a bit of rope.' She's a precocious little murder machine, oh yes she is. Be grateful I don't have baby photos of her, and Ghostwheel's are classified.

You see, Suhuy would have wanted me to take a staff, sword or talisman of power with me when I walked the Logrus, something to enhance my might. I'd realized that I was perfectly capable of enhancing my _own _might, and what I needed was something to keep annoying people who really deserved to be strangled off my back while I did so.

Cough, Dara, cough.

At which point I headed into Shadow to locate my father, and failing that to 'connect' with him by heading for the Shadow he'd told me about, where I ended up attending a university near Silicon Valley to study computers and their magical applications, met Julia, Luke and the demon currently possessing Nayda, had a lot of interesting philosophical conversations and someone trying to kill me every April 30th.

So, when I finally ran into the Broken Serpent, between Frakir not even tightening on my wrist, much less readying herself to spring, and the demonic red eyes, I was fully prepared to accept that he was just as chill as he looked, and might have asked what he was smoking and where I could get some if it weren't for the fact that zapping her neural enhancers had done a lot to fix the Asuka problem.

For a genius like her, things like that were just a crutch, and you could tell that under the bluster there wasn't a lot of real confidence, despite her achievements. What if she started to think that she was only that smart because of those things? Stimulating _uncontrolled _brain activity is more likely to cause strokes than insight, and believe me, sorcerers have been looking into ways to get smarter, since intelligence is power, since before the Logrus. Those things were frying that brain, giving her an anxiety disorder and mild paranoia rather like being on certain street drugs (ever since finding out about hallucinogens causing uncontrolled shadow walking, I've kept track of various drugs in order to avoid being slipped them and so I know what the damage is if someone slips them to a relative) from the constant exposure. Given SEELE, I'm sure the side effects were all the better from their perspective.

Also, I'd met Rei. This kid kind of reminded me of Luke, although come to think of it, while that can say a lot about someone's fundamental decency (a walk through Shadows conjured up by Luke's subconscious yielded a bar and a Chesire Cat, not ravening monsters- Well, alright, not more than two ravening monsters, and one of them was Jurt's fault), it… Well, Luke is a very goal-oriented person. Try not to be a convenient path to that goal, or you are going to be taken for a ride, although he does make sure you have fun along the way. If he likes you.

However, he has a marked dislike of killing or even hurting people when it wasn't necessary, something which made Gilva, my favorite of my Hendrake relations, look at him like he was… while I was on Shadow Earth I would have said 'from another planet,' except that in a normal dwelling in the Courts of Chaos, you will usually pass through a half-dozen different Shadows on the way to the bathroom.

He stopped trying to kill me because he didn't really want to succeed, and he stopped avenging his father after killing Uncle Caine since vengeance turned out to not give him any satisfaction, although I'd prefer it if you didn't spread this around. I'm fond of Luke, and this kind of thing could ruin his reputation as the son of Brand, who tried to destroy all of Shadow to make himself God of the new realities.

I'd like to say that I'm not fond of killing people, but honestly, I'm an engineer. I like problems that are solved and won't come back to haunt me when I've got other problems to deal with. Never really picked up that particular bit of Shadow Earth culture, that whole 'compassion for the enemy' thing, unlike Luke. Someone tries to kill me, I'm going to make a point of remembering them if I _don't _manage to finish them off, I'm not going to agonize over it.

When Julia was posing as Mask, she wasn't on the same page as the rest of us. Jurt and I were assuming that of course she was straight-up trying to kill me, and I'd damn well be trying to murder Mask right back, while _she _thought she was teaming up with my little brother to prank the hell out of me as payback for screwing with her. It said something about her disgust for SEELE that she set Jurt loose on them not just knowing he was going to slaughter them, but giving at least tacit approval by telling him to dump the bodies far, far away from the Shadow they'd ravaged.

Growing up with Dalt's mercenaries, not to mention groomed by Jasra to help her avenge his father, you'd have thought that Luke would have internalized the whole 'kill or be killed' thing more than someone like me, who had a fairly peaceful childhood, aside from wandering out into the Pit of Chaos accompanied only by a few demons and my half-brother Jurt trying to kill me on rare occassions.

His preference for not actually finishing people off (he's fine with violence, and he'll certainly kill if he needs to) is probably Luke's particular brand of the family's insanity, I tell myself. Given who his father was, that's probably getting off lightly, and Vialle taking a liking to him, probably because she sensed this in him, is why he got off so lightly after murdering Uncle Caine. Well, that and the rest of the family understanding that he had a perfectly reasonable vendetta against his father's killer, and since no one felt strongly enough to avenge Caine by killing Luke, not when he was under Queen Vialle's protection, that was the end of it.

In fact, if I wanted to go out on a limb here, I might even go so far as to say that Luke was nice, although not where anyone related to me could hear me, given that 'nice' is within spitting distance of 'soft' and there's barely any line at all between 'soft' and 'dead.' I'm sometimes told that I'm a fairly nice person, but there a lot of people, including Julia, who could tell you that those people are idiots. I normally act fairly helpful because that's just good sense. If you're my enemy, though, or I'm in a mood… Well, Julia had very good reason to break up with me. That was a crummy thing to do.

My mother is Dara and my father is a Prince of Amber. An immense natural talent for bastardry runs in the family. I try to be a good person, but that's a little more work. Luke has the opposite problem, but fortunately his genius at being a tricky bastard compensates.

Like this afternoon, when he'd sat back and just been amused when Kaji went after me, as the only one who had made the mistake of answering any questions as opposed to just smiling at him or threatening to rip his tongue out if he didn't shut up and pass the beer. I wasn't actually sure if he'd dumped an unconscious Commander of NERV on me as part of some plan or just to see what happened. It could go either way, depending on whether this was Luke or his pattern-ghost.

I usually tell which is which by whether he's with Coral or Nayda, or which he's paying just a little bit more attention to, but he'd come solo this time.

See, Luke's pattern ghost, who I call Rinaldo when both of them are present, is a copy of his memories made by the Pattern when he walked it. Which was before he came to Shadow Earth, obviously, since those with the Blood of Amber need to walk the Pattern or the Logrus before they can walk through Shadow by themselves.

He's gotten caught up on what he missed, but he wasn't actually here on Shadow Earth for those college days and years going steady with Nayda when she was possessing Gail. So he's more attached to Kashfa, and Coral was at least a childhood acquaintance he got along with well enough for their families to arrange the marriage. I could definitely see him seeing this as a vacation and just playing it by ear. Not that Luke's improvisation isn't much better than my attempts at planning.

Luke, though, would be a lot more personally invested in the place, and as ticked off as I am about the place of our happy memories being underwater because of some bastard's plan to remodel the world the way they wanted it (I'd wisely refrained from pointing out any similarities with Luke's father). He'd be more likely to rack his brains to come up with something elaborate, although he'd still be perfectly willing to take advantage of an opportunity dropping in his lap like Rei deciding to follow along with the other unicorn tamely instead of rescuing Gendo.

Rei did a lot of things tamely. For instance, right now she was carrying bags of ice and artificially-flavored seafood snacks.

I could have carried the ice as well as the beer myself, since we of Amber are much stronger than shadow denizens, but there's a level of stronger that's 'wow, you must work out'/'you're stronger than you look' and a level that's downright suspicious.

Whatever Luke's plan with Rei was, his plan with turning up in my apartment had turned out to be getting to drink a lot of the local beers on my dime while Kaji kept up (or at least pretended to keep up) in hope that the rest of us would loosen our lips faster than his were loosened. Since leaving Rei with Luke unsupervised (an agent and _Jurt_ didn't count) sounded about as good an idea as leaving a young and impressionable Ghostwheel with Luke, I'd asked her to give me a hand when I went for more beer and crazy snack foods to show Luke.

Frakir's proximity warning for a known relative made me swing a little out of the way, and hearing Shinji _laugh _had made me quicken my pace a little.

Rei stopped in her tracks for a moment: the sound was probably as odd to her as it was to me.

Shinji is the kind of kid that Hendrakes find unbelievably cute: young, stupid, prone to mass destruction when pissed off. I may resemble that somewhat, which might be what kept me from losing all standing in Gilva's eyes once she realized that yes, I had been that oblivious.

Shinji was a scrawny thing, especially for someone of the blood, who would bake cakes at other people's whims. People that desperate to please are trying to get people to like them, either for personal advantage or they just need someone to like them that badly.

Growing up, I had my demons. Shinji didn't seem to have had anyone like that, to give him what ideally, parents should, and since I was studying up on parenthood myself, it was more than a little obvious. Kids need, if not their parents, _someone_. Misato was doing her part, but she was also his commanding officer, and that meant she had to keep a level of distance which meant she couldn't hold down both jobs, as much as she wanted to. Maybe at the beginning she'd managed to pretend well enough to fool them both, but something must have happened before I showed up that revealed to Shinji that when Misato had to choose between the mission and Shinji, it was Shinji that was going to get shafted. That when the chips were down, she didn't love him enough to protect him when it was him or her job, forget him or the world. Not like family should, with a kid's life on the line.

I supposed this kind of thing was going to end up as good training for Shinji.

Never trust a relative, or someone working for one.

Laughter is something we do to put fear behind us, or try to. The laughter of someone who is anxious and trying to hide it is very different from someone who feels safe, which was one of the red flags when it came to Asuka: what did _she _have to be nervous about? Someone with officer training shouldn't regard Shinji as a threat, that was just ridiculously paranoid. And this is an Amberite saying this.

Shinji'd laughed when I showed him the trumps and made a few quips, and while he'd started to relax a little the more he thought he knew me, Shinji knew that the world was out to get him and when the chips were down, no one had his back. Rei was the only one who would try to protect him, but he knew too much about the danger they were in to think that she _could _protect him, and worrying about her getting herself killed? He couldn't even protect himself: how was he going to protect Rei?

My first guess was that it was another relative I hadn't known about, someone whose voice sounded a bit like Shinji's (I'm not a trained musician like my father), but if Rei thought it sounded like him, too? Second was that someone might be impersonating Gendo, but then there would have been notes of 'is this really happening?'

My third guess, when I found them sprawled out on a grassy slope on something that didn't qualify as a park, more a tucked-away bit of landscaping, was that they'd been smoking something, or at least sharing a couple beers from some vending machine, and that I would probably be for Shinji getting to unwind a little (just as long as he did it in this Shadow instead of ditching it for another one) if it weren't for the fact that if it showed up in the bloodwork, Misato was going to attempt bloody murder of _somebody_, and Shinji was tense enough without her going at his throat in the process of interrogating him about why he'd done something so stupid, didn't he know that if he failed as a pilot everyone was going to die, and who'd slipped it to him?! Was it Kaji? It was Kaji, she knew it!

"Oh, hello, Ayanami, Mister Corey," Shinji said, sounding a little nervous that other people had come by, even if we weren't quite strangers.

"Thought I heard you over here," I said with a nod, smiling. "Sounded like you were having a good time. So, who's the new friend?"

"This is Kaoru," he said, smiling brightly again. "Kaoru Nagisa."

Later, I found out that it wasn't written with any proper characters, just the katakana for ka-wo-ru, and I wasn't Benedict, I just knew enough written Japanese to get by in computers, electronics and corporate culture, so I didn't realize that if you pulled apart the character that was pronounced 'Nagisa' and meant 'seashore,' you got two that put side-by-side meant 'messenger.' Just like 'shito,' or 'angel.' It was one of the Akagis that clued Ghost into that, same as the following bit.

'Ka-wo-ru' was letter substitution code, and it would have been a pretty clever one, if Jurt hadn't decapitated SEELE with several angels yet to go. Take 'the end.' 'O-wa-ri.' Then add one, replacing each letter with the next in the alphabet.

The last of the messengers, the seventeenth angel, wouldn't have been the end of the world. One more, the eighteenth. The shadow's denizens themselves, not the Broken Pattern, Broken Logrus or the chaos-demons spawned from it, would have destroyed their own world.

And here was the seventeenth angel, disguised as one of the eighteenth. The seventeenth, and the first. That kind of cipher probably appealed to the medieval minds of Shadow Earth's occultists.

"That's the point," Julia told me later. "Of course Gendo Ikari would have gotten the message. There's no point in being so clever if no one's going to get the joke. But this probably isn't something they made up on the spur of the moment, just as a message to NERV. A project name."

Which made me think of Ghostwheel, all the references hidden in that name. The coldness of the trumps, for one thing, like Shadow Earth superstitions about restless spirits, that could walk through walls. I decided that I didn't know enough about Japanese/European culture to try to pick all of them out, and I'd rather not waste my time playing a dead man's little games. No matter which of the members of SEELE had picked out the name and cackled over it, they were dead now.

That thought made me glance over at Luke. Could we have a son wanting to avenge his father on our hands?

When I saw Rei peering at 'Kaoru' I'd braced myself a little. Natural enemies, and the fact that they were broken shadows of the Pattern and the Logrus might make them a little more… elemental in their behavior. More likely to start with the epic confrontations, spawning storms that tore reality apart, less likely to start bitching about stuff that happened so long ago that no one but them, Suhuy and maybe Dworkin was going to remember, forget _care_.

He just smiled and said, "Hello. We're the same, you and I."

She looked puzzled, so he nodded over at the other side of Shinji. "Would you like to join us? We're discussing music."

Rei glanced at Shinji (for permission), and then, even though she rarely did anything anyone asked unless it was an order or instruction (I got the feeling there was a big bag of issues involved), she sat down next to Shinji's other side, maybe just an inch closer to him than Kaoru was. I could feel the aura of challenge in the air, the unicorn's horn lowered, lifting a hoof in preparation to paw at the ground, raring to charge.

Kaoru just smiled, looking honestly glad Rei had decided to join them, and I decided I wanted Luke's assessment.

I was pretty close to the apartment building, so it wasn't much of a problem to throw the ice up on top of one of the cases I was carrying. I took the stairs: less likely to run into anyone else that way, and I could take a look down at them every so often.

"What exactly did you want him to take a look at for you?" Kaji asked, following me and Luke out onto the balcony.

"That's what I'd like to know," Luke said, after judging where I was looking and spotting the three of them. "Not all of us are as tech-savvy as you."

Luke made his own trumps: he's definitely no slouch in the magic department, not with Jasra teaching him a good amount of chaos magic. "Rei's counterpart showed up," I said, as the silver head turned up to look at us, and a moment later brown and blue followed. Shinji waved: the three of us waved back.

"Oh?" Jurt asked, a slightly dangerous note in his voice, as he followed us out to the balcony. His eyes narrowed. "That's him. Or one of them, anyway. Julia was going to take care of that_." _

"Should I…" I started to ask, but Jurt was already gone. I swore. Luke or I would at least have needed to pull out a trump to contact Julia, which would have meant some time to reason or plan, but Jurt had something of the powers of a Living Trump, and he'd always been impulsive. "Keep an eye on things," I supposed, checking on a couple of the spikard's power sources and considering. Binding even a Broken Logrus? The Serpent would slither out eventually. If it were a snake you could put it into torpor, but we were talking elemental Chaos here, like Misato and the others in Ritsuko's department doing NERV's tech support had seen in that last attack, the one that supposedly hadn't happened. Like a Chaosite using their demon forms, they'd change to something that would take what you threw at it, the way Dara and Mandor had tried during our battle. A highly skilled form of dueling, laden with ritual and significance, but I had a spikard and wasn't playing.

Obliteration was the default solution, and perhaps it would send a message back to the Logrus, but the point was to avoid any more damage to Shadow Earth. Amber descended into civil war just because the Pattern got blood-spattered, and I'd finally managed to figure out when exactly the Serpent got its eye torn out. There was a big gap in the Courts of Chaos' records right around then, because the people who were lucky enough to be out of town during the initial obliteration of the Courts and several rings of Shadow were too busy surviving the decades of ferocious shadow storms which followed to take a lot of notes. Sounded a little too much like Second Impact for my comfort.

We were too close to Terminal Dogma, too, and the Broken Pattern maintained the fundamental order of earth's organic matter. Ritsuko's guess was that all living matter would break down within hours if Lilith was destroyed. Which raised the question of what would happen if the Broken Logrus was destroyed: would change, evolution, creativity go with it, or did the breaks in the local Pattern mean the Logrus wasn't something necessary but something incompatible, that would introduce too much chaos for the shards of a Pattern to handle?

Kaji borrowed a rope from me to tie it around a six-pack and dangle it over the balcony. Much less hazardous than my methods of fishing for ex-girlfriends. I made a note of it.

Rei lay down like the other two, and Kaoru shifted to lay on his side to face towards the other two, and, well, I started to feel nostalgic. Shinji and Kaoru were supposed to be enemies, Rei might jump in to protect one of them by killing the other: if they'd been discussing philosophy instead of music, might have been Luke, myself and Gail back at Berkeley.

The evening wore on, and I started to wonder a little about where Jurt was. Misato working late was normal: they might not have noticed that Gendo was gone, although I didn't ask Luke. If NERV's security battered down my door, _then_ I'd yell at him, but until then I'd do him the courtesy of assuming he'd done the professional thing and covered his tracks, not to mention the courteous thing and not brought trouble down on his host and the guy who had just gone on a beer run for him. Oh, right, I thought, snapping my fingers. Could have conjured it through Shadow. Not like Kaji didn't already have questions.

In theory, when I did that, someone in some other Shadow Earth would be wondering where their beer went off to, but what can I say. King of Chaos or not, the Blood of Amber runs in these veins.

"What is this…" we heard from below. "Kaji?" Asuka asked us.

Managing not to wince, he asked her "Is Misato home yet?"

"What do you think?" Asuka asked crossly, pointing at the beer and how it was still there. Right, stupid question. "What I want to know is where dinner is. If Shinji doesn't get in the kitchen before Misato does…"

Kaji and I winced. Living over that apartment, I'd smelled Misato's most recent attempt to cook. "Why don't you come up here," I offered. "Luke brought German from home, and a lot of people are no-shows."

"I did?" Luke asked. I was already reaching through Shadow while reaching in the direction of the kitchen counter.

"Mind unboxing it?" I asked the king of a single Shadow. "I'm getting a little worried about Jurt."

Once I was in my bedroom, I flipped through my Trumps to find Jurt's. "It's about damn time!" was his response. "She had to pull in too much power, and Jasra didn't tell her what to do if this happened!"

"Damn," I echoed, because the situation definitely called for it.

Only those of the Blood of Amber can step on the Pattern and survive, so the powers that come from walking it are restricted to the descendants of Oberon. Of which there are several dozen, most of them unknown, just _first generation _descendants, according to what Oberon told my father Corwin. But there are others who want the perks too. The more distant a Shadow is from Amber, the more distorted the Patterns become. There are a handful that can be walked as easily as the one beneath Castle Amber, and then there are ones with holes, gaps. The Way of the Broken Pattern, of which Jasra is a practitioner and which she initiated Julia into, involves entering through a gap in the edge of the pattern and walking to the center between the Pattern's lines. Step onto one of those lines, and they die. I'd been told that power was summoned through the gap in the Pattern, but calling forth too much ran the risk of the initiate falling in. Since Jasra wanted Julia to use me as a human sacrifice, in order to make me suffer more as I died, it shouldn't have surprised me that she hadn't told Julia all the tricks. And she wouldn't exactly have been inclined to fill her in after Julia turned on her and turned her into a coat rack.

"Luke?" I said, sticking my head out my bedroom door and not breaking contact with Jurt. "Julia's in trouble with the gap in her Broken Pattern. Do you-"

Luke was already shrugging, because heck if he knew. He could walk the Pattern: he hadn't needed to bother with the cumbersome, dangerous… well, more dangerous methods used by various adepts, such as his mother.

I momentarily contemplated contacting Jasra, but I didn't have anything to hold over her head at the moment, and calling her to let her know what was happening to her wayward apprentice wouldn't really do much but make her day. While she _might _help just for the laugh and the chance of getting Julia to grovel, I'd have to talk her into it, and I had a spikard, those rings that tap multiple great power sources out in the infinity of Shadow. It was one thing to toss a few quasars worth of juice at a planetary target, but I'd gotten the impression that once an Adept walked a Broken Pattern, their version of it became more of an astral power construct, and the gap in the pattern itself would provide a heat sink.

"Mind if I come through anyway?" I asked Jurt, because my younger brother was my former rival and this was my ex.

"Don't touch her, that'll break her concentration," he warned me. "Just do something to reduce the pull! I've got a plan to patch the gap." The familiar shimmer of someone trumping out.

Maybe I should have asked 'how,' but I was concerned about Julia, and he was the one who actually lived with Julia and was actually willing to talk about magic with her, unlike his sometimes devastatingly immature older brother.

I didn't have the Jewel of Judgment anymore, but I did have some experience repairing a broken pattern. Transforming just enough to get a claw, I told Julia to "Hang on!" and pierced an index finger, touching one of the lines of sputtering blue and using power to join the blood to it, hold the blood that had walked both Amber's pattern and the Jewel's higher initiation in midair, joining it to a line on the other side of the gap. Since the Pattern was drawn in something like the blood of Amber, spilling blood on it could overwrite it, confuse its order, but the goal here was to do a patch job, but not a through enough patch job that this Pattern would be too complete for a mere shadow-denizen like Julia to force power out of it. If I managed to at least lessen the pull, then Julia could focus on something besides clawing her way out of the darkness, the hole in the Pattern that resembled the Pit of Chaos more the more I looked at it… Anyway, she was the one who knew the Way of the Broken Pattern out of the three of us, so she was the one most likely to come up with something, although perhaps she already had known what to do and that was what Jurt was doing now.

Behind me I heard, well, you hear claws tearing through flesh once, and a gurgle trying to become a startled scream? I couldn't see, but Julia's horrified eyes stared past me. I had to grab her hand now, as a body came hurtling past me, into the gap.

Rei.

The pull from the gap abruptly stopped. Rei's body and blood must have been an influx of more than enough imperfect order to restore equilibrium. I turned around to see Jurt gone again. Instead of taking the time to reach for Luke's trump, I traced the spikard to get back to the apartment.

"That… that…" Julia looked up at me with enraged eyes. "He just killed that girl!"

"Ah," Luke said, enlightened. "Cultural differences."

"Pardon?" Kaji stared at him.

"Why they're not married yet. Cultural differences. Value of human life. If someone dies, but you can just go to a slightly different universe where there's a version of them that's still alive… Our fathers' generation thought they were gods. I _thought _the Courts were the same way, or else…" Luke shrugged.

The Black Road. Luke's father's mad plan. All the Shadows the first had devastated, while the second would have annihilated all of them.

"I told him I had it! I just needed the blood of Amber, and _he _has it," through Dara, and Benedict, "so I should have known, why would he even want to get you, even if you've walked both and he's only walked the Logrus…"

"Well, she can't be dead," I said. "You've got your own internal Broken Pattern, Julia," so it should maintain her cellular integrity even if all other life on earth lost its, "and Luke and I have walked the Pattern, but Kaji's a shadow denizen." I ended up glancing out the glass doors just to be sure. Yes: the hills were still green.

"Did he just…" Julia's fists clenched. "Did he just _try to destroy my homeworld just to save me?!" _

I wasn't dumb enough to point out that a lot of people would have considered that kind of thing romantic. People who didn't give a damn about planet Earth's survival, anyway.

Jurt had gotten while the getting was good, and I doubted he'd come slinking back into blasting range of Julia before he came up with something. "Can we examine your pattern-construct?" I asked Julia. "Do you know where that gap goes to?"

"I'll contact Coral," Luke said, pulling out his deck of Trumps.

"Good idea. Having the Jewel of Judgment handy can't hurt."

"That… Jurt," Julia said firmly, pushing back the anger of 'bastard just disemboweled a kid right in front of me and nearly killed billions of people… hell, billions of people may still die, since hell if I know why they're not dead yet,' in favor of the immediate emergency, "Said the Broken Logrus was here."

"He's with Shinji," I told her.

"Shinji isn't your Shadow," she told me, "but he fits into the place one would be, so the Broken Pattern and Broken Logrus are reacting to him in a shadow of the way Amber's Pattern and the Logrus react to you."

Well, crap. "Nothing's happened yet, they're just talking," I said, but then it was a few years before the Pattern and Logrus got serious about forcing me to choose sides, and in the Pattern's case, forcing me to sleep with Coral have a kid that it could use instead of me if/when I annoyed it enough that eliminating me became preferable to using me to annoy the Logrus. The Logrus hadn't had a problem with my mother trying to mind-control me into serving it, but that was mostly her. The Serpent of Chaos itself doesn't think in terms of limiting people's free will, for obvious reasons.

"I used the parts of my Broken Pattern that weren't broken to try to seal the Broken Logrus," she explained, "but it kept shifting, finding the gaps. I should have guessed that: the absence of order implies chaos… All I could do was attempt to walk it on the astral plane, find a way through the holes to the center of its power, but according to what Jurt said about pattern-ghosts, when you walk either the Pattern or the Logrus, even through their gaps, they scan your mind."

"It's more like you rewrite yourself," I said. "To contain the power of order or chaos. If you can't, if you stop moving," that was when you died. "People used to think that the Pattern only examined parts of your memories, the parts that flashed into your mind as you walked, but Pattern Ghosts mean they must get a copy of _everything _you know when you walk them."

"It was interested in Rei, everything about the real Pattern and Logrus, but a chain of associations led to you and Shinji, and he left while I was still trying to walk him. When the Broken Logrus vanished out from under me, I found myself right in the middle of the gap in my Broken Pattern."

I winced.

She nodded. "If I hadn't already gotten _some _mastery over chaos," by walking as much of it as it took for it to get enough of her memories to be satisfied?

I didn't like the idea of Ghostwheel anywhere near the center of the Logrus' power, but if there was any chance the pit in the Broken Pattern corresponded to _the _Pit… A Broken Pattern, a little unicorn with all her legs broken in the domain of the Serpent? Shadow Earth is important to me, but knowing what I was to Dara, what all his children were to my father's father Oberon… If I hadn't had faith in Ghostwheel, I wouldn't have pulled out his Trump. It was up to him whether or not it was too much of a risk, now that the Logrus had gotten some time to adapt to his tricks.

Maybe I'd try Kergma first…


	3. Chapter 3

_So, I'm reading the short stories, and I'm remembering that Vialle was married to Random explicitly to make his life miserable since the queen of Rebma hates him (and Amber) because of her daughter's suicide (and Oberon's history of dick moves) and thinking that 'yeah, if this was the Corwin books it would turn out three books later that she was doing something evil here that eventually will screw over Luke,' and I mean, _Vialle_. That's proper paranoia in the first half of the Amber series for you. Reading the short stories, I could just feel myself getting back into the Corwin books mindset of 'remember, everyone you meet is an asshole.' _

_Doesn't help that she had Luke contact someone that we know from Book 10 attempted to mind-control Merlin. Three different spikards with mind control spells put upon the same bedpost by three different people/groups (some of them allied with/planning to betray people in the other groups) for three different purposes, and, according to Frakir, the one that got Merlin and hexed him into putting on a strange magical artifact found in a room belonging to someone who tried to destroy most of existence was the one that wasn't even targeted at him? He got the one meant to compel _Luke _into picking it up, because apparently Brand failed to take into consideration that his son might become close enough friends with another _Amberite (_of all the untrustworthy people that could never make for True Companions) for the Law of Contagion to come into effect._

That _is a gambit-pile-up, Amber style. _

_A whole bunch of stuff was about to go down. The stories are very worth reading for the looming HSQ. Also Frakir and Flora team-up~_

_There are two possible positions in the birth order for Delwin and Sand. I went with the more interesting one._

_Pity there's no Frigga for Merlin anywhere in the Amber books, although the absence of any Frigga in both generations may explain why everyone sucks so hard at parenting. Merlin and Ghostwheel's relationship is honestly the healthiest parent-child relationship we see, and that's with Ghostwheel having the AI Is A Crapshoot phase and trying to kill him until they get it sorted out. Corwin doesn't get much chance to parent Merlin. After he finds out that 'oh shit, I have a kid, I need to make up for all those absent years by teaching him a lot of life lessons in a hurry,' we get the first five Books of Amber. _

* * *

Kergma had solved for Rei's location and found her still on Shadow Earth, but Asuka rang the doorbell in search of food and then yelled down to Shinji to get up here and eat, since she was _not _carrying his even deader than usual weight if he got poisoned by Misato's cooking. I found it wisest to hang a few spells before heading into work a little on the late side, swinging by a couple places on the way, just in case.

Sitting on top of a bike rack near the entrance to Shinji's school, the Broken Logrus tilted his head at me, rather like the raven that was perched on his knee. I was the only one on the street who could see them.

Even though I didn't summon the Logrus into my mind to use Logrus Sight any more, it was clear that the raven whose feathers he was stroking was a chaos being, rather like the denizens of the Courts. Not something more rarified and inhuman like the bodiless ty'iga, such as Gail/Nayda.

Which made it an angel, but it was pushing its head and wings up into the avatar's hand instead of attacking. "Lilith's soul has returned to Terminal Dogma," he explained when I said I was just swinging by on the way to see Rei: if he had any way of knowing what happened to his counterpart, that might say interesting things. Or not. "Either her original body or one of the other clones Fuyutsuki had made. If it is the latter, they will likely pretend nothing happened. Ritsuko would not want to answer Misato's questions about Rei's whereabouts while she is searching for Gendo Ikari."

Ghost must have told Julia about the clones, I realized. I'd told him to pass everything on to Julia, since it was her home Shadow. I'd head over as soon as I'd made it clear to this little Serpent that "You're going to stay away from her, and from Shinji."

"No," he said, looking up to meet my eyes squarely. "Rei and Shinji are like me."

Huh? Well, yes, I'd often thought that the Serpent and the Unicorn had a lot alike, being incredibly petty, selfish bastards for one thing, but "Shinji?"

"He was born just to give someone else power. To be used as a tool for the destruction of this world, even though that isn't what he wants. Even though he's a Lilim, he's the same as I am, and Lilith as well. He likes music, too," he said, smile growing distant, focused on some memory of speaking with Shinji instead of on me. "You're like us as well: you understand, don't you? You want to protect Ghostwheel from ever feeling that way, from ever being something just to be used, the way King Random saw him as something that shouldn't exist, because he would be too dangerous in the wrong hands. When his hands were yours, and now were his own." He looked down at the chaos demon taking the form of a bird, eyes warm and doting. "I want to protect him, and so does Rei. They are worthy of my sympathy. I want them to be happy."

So he empathized with them? If they were sad, or worse, dead, he'd be sad for them, so if they were happy… Far too simple, nice, neat to be true, as much as it appealed for that exact reason.

I considered bringing Luke in, but no, for the same reason I hadn't wanted him unattended around Rei. Leaving _Luke _around young, impressionable and easily led avatars would be like giving him access to Ghost… wheel… dammit.

Well, I thought to myself, unlike Rei (thanks to Yui's genetic material, which meant that Shinji got it from _both sides_), Kaworu wasn't a relative. My odds were better with him than with Rei, and _much _better than with Shinji.

"I could walk between worlds," he said thoughtfully, unaware of my thoughts, "but Rei cannot. Her order is the order of this world. So, for her to be happy, Shinji must find happiness in this world."

I've heard plenty of 'I'm on your side,' in my time. Regardless of whether or not they're lying, one of the things I've had to learn as someone with the blood of Amber is that it's never _true. _Everyone is always on their own side. You may end up fighting back to back with them fairly often, but no one's interests are going to coincide with yours _all _the time.

I'd much rather have someone who honestly makes me want to punch their front teeth in than a skilled liar.

Jurt and Mandor, for instance. Jurt honestly tried to kill me. Mandor was a big brother to me. One of these things hurts more, and one of them means that now, we can actually be friends. I wish Mandor the best, but if he violated his exile, or came within several shadows of me when it wasn't for an event arranged in advance, like his wedding, I'd have to kill him. Dara believes in the Logrus. I don't know what Mandor wants, unless it's power, like Fiona, and that means that he's still not honest with me.

Kaworu seemed to be under the impression that I wanted to take Shinji away at some point to let him walk the Pattern. If that was what Julia had assumed, then I was honestly touched, after I'd tried to stifle her talent for magic. He was assuming that I cared about what I thought was best for Shinji enough that we'd have a conflict of interest over it. He wasn't quite picking a fight with me, but he was telling me something he thought I wasn't going to want to hear, just like he'd told me no earlier.

Was this what it was like for my Amberite aunts and uncles, dealing with me? Aww, such a cute little kid. He thinks he's all grown up just because he got away from one set of people trying to use him. I almost felt like giving him a pat on the head and fishing around in my pocket to see if there was some candy or something.

Well, I did have some change. "Come on," I said finally. "I'll buy you a juice."

I ended up buying three of them, since apparently he hadn't managed to store Julia's memories except for the relevant ones and didn't know what any of the flavors were like. Three because a patch of darkness crawled up out of his shirt pocket, and then a black and white ball sprang into existence a couple inches ahead of it.

He poured a bit of all three of the juices into the shadow, not the ball, I noticed, then he poured them into a cupped hand for the raven, after taking a sip of each of them. Two angels were awake, not one, and they weren't attacking?

Well, it wasn't like the Chaosite half of my family attacked each other to walk the Logrus, and these were Shadows of the same kind of beings they were, roughly. Making them about as human as the Chaos half of my family, and possibly slightly more human than the Amber half, provided the Unicorn really was in there. Of course, if these really were spawned directly from Adam, the Broken Logrus, then that would make them along the lines of Oberon himself. So something like half-human, insofar as any of us count as human?

"This is Frakir," I said, showing him the braided cord around one of my wrists. "Go on, say hello," I told her, which was more or less leaving the form of the 'hello' and the number of dead bodies involved up to her.

One of her ends poked itself up, in the direction of his outstretched hand. "May I?" he asked me.

"Sure," I said, as he tried petting her with a finger, the way he had the raven. His body was humanoid enough that Frakir should work as a lie detector without having to use more than her passive magic.

He was delighted when she crawled up his arm, circling around his shoulders to come up in front of his face: even when she brushed against his neck, it just never occurred to him that she might attack him. People tend to assume that others are like them: that works for my aunts and uncles because they're right about the rest being schemers. Doesn't work so well for honest people, and people who just don't think in terms of attacking others, and that means it doesn't occur to them that other people might want to attack them… Even though the Logrus gave her life, after the time he gave her sentience and then took it away until I managed to replace it, Frakir hasn't liked the Serpent all that much. So, when she pulled away from vital areas to crawl down into the shadow by the orb, which seemed to be some kind of bottomless pit, and then out again to go out to his knee and examine the raven, I relaxed a little more and finished my coffee.

"So, friends of yours?" I asked, indicating the angels.

"The children of my past life." He ran a finger gently over the edge of the black hole on his shirtfront. "They were looking for me. I was alone, and told that all of us were called to destroy or die first, but… they were just looking for me."

So, possibly attempting to prey on my sympathies, as a father with a rather odd assortment of children (Ghostwheel was my Minerva, the product of my brain, but Frakir _was _something like half drawn from the Serpent, and honestly I did not want to imagine her in as many beds as Oberon was in, when she eventually let me upgrade her with shapeshifting so she could assume humanoid form. Or demonic. The Courts often prefer the latter – to stay in humanoid form all the time smacks of orderly sympathies), in which case I would annihilate him, for exposing his children to danger (me) in order to use them as tools.

Although yes, in my younger days, pot, kettle, and then there was the time I left Frakir tied to a bedpost for trying to warn me, although in my defense I was being mind-controlled by the enchanted ring she was desperately trying to warn me about at the time. He was trying to figure out how to survive in this world and despite possibly being a future enemy he deserved some sympathy, some guidance…

Oh. Yes, this really was how my Amberite relatives used to see me, bright young completely clueless lad from the Courts of Chaos, when they'd just fought a _war_ with Amber.

…And he wasn't paying attention to me at all anymore, Frakir's cord twining around pale fingers as they preened black feathers. "This is Bardiel," he told her, "And the shy child who uses his shadow as a distraction is Leliel. I'm trying to find the rest of them before they wake up, so the Lilim won't detect them and Shinji won't worry."

* * *

"Gendo Ikari?" Rei asked me once I'd identified which of them had the soul and fished that one up out of the tank. As far as I could tell, Ritsuko hadn't even noticed that Rei was missing, not when Gendo Ikari was missing.

"Oh, I gave him to Kaji."

She looked confused, so I assumed she was wondering why I'd done that.

"Well, _he _seemed to have a use for him, and _I _certainly didn't want him cluttering up the place." Possibly waking up who knows when. "I told Kaji to tie him down securely, and then times that a few times." Although I was sure Gendo would get loose eventually, whenever he woke up.

Also, Kaji had questions, and _I _certainly didn't feel like being interrogated. Gendo, on the other hand, entirely deserved to be thrown to the wolves.

"Who is Kaji?" she asked next, and that was when I realized there might be a problem.

* * *

When I trumped back to my apartment (trumps can be drawn of locations as well as people), my guest (these apartments came with two spare bedrooms, and it would be handy to have someone nearby in case Jurt decided to relapse to 'it's all Merlin's fault,' or at least that was my excuse) had acquired a mass of white hair ribbons with a skull-like shape on the sort of brooch in the middle. I wondered if it was a Dia de los Muertos thing before remembering wrong continent, and when it moved I figured he'd picked up another angel, unless one of the two he already had decided to shapeshift. Chaosites did that.

He was happy to see her, and she was neutral to see him. I'd worried if without memories of being socialized as a human, an avatar of order, however Broken, would have more innate hostility to an avatar of chaos, but if anything she seemed more intrigued and less territorial. Kaworu not lying next to Shinji, if she knew who Shinji was right now (it was rather disgusting that she knew Gendo Ikari's name, and that she was supposed to obey orders, but not much else), might have had something to do with it. This time, she was the one to say "You are like me," in tones of quiet amazement instead of Kaworu's happy greeting.

Briefly, I contemplated informing the Serpent and the Unicorn that there was a Shadow where the versions of them got along well enough that Rei was soon the one sporting a pretty yet Gothic hair ribbon (I'm not really in a position to disapprove of accessorizing with lethal chaos beings when I'm sporting a strangling cord on my wrist), not to mention that the clothing problem had been temporarily solved by Kaworu offering her some of the school uniform shirts and pants he'd probably magicked up. So he'd made sure to remember Julia's knowledge of magic, if not her knowledge of food…

I was frying up some bacon for myself, the raven, and the hair ribbon and bottomless pit if they wanted any (a unicorn not eating meat I can understand, but a vegetarian Serpent? The way both of them wrinkled their noses at the scent of cooking bacon was probably a dead giveaway that they weren't human, although they didn't mind the eggs – come to think of it, given the red eyes and vaguely albino appearance, they might be rabbitlike enough to explain the rabbit food) when Jurt arrived, looking like he'd gone on a bender, and take it from me, that takes work. I had to wonder if he was going for the pitiful effect deliberately.

I added a couple more slices of bacon, but only a couple, because this was still my annoying younger brother and also I was here to _save _this Shadow, not watch it collapse into goo all around me.

He was a little taken aback to see Rei, but she just stared at him, clearly having no earthly or unearthly clue who this weirdo was and why he was staring at her.

Kaworu looked a little more likely to start something, but red eyes flickered to the hair ribbon (who was named Zeruel, apparently), and I guess he figured that if Jurt tried to make off with Rei again, Zeruel could make like Frakir long enough for Rei to call for help and him to do… whatever he did other than large explosions, hopefully, because we were indoors and I'd told him that we were right over Shinji's apartment.

The bait in the Misato trap had vanished before I woke up (looked like she'd cut the knot) and Kaworu invited Rei out onto the balcony to re-bait it with sheet music, partially in order to get her away from the guy who had cut her open. The raven stayed with me, or rather with the bacon.

"I didn't think she was actually going to die," Jurt said sulkily, and I wondered who he was talking about, Rei or Julia. "That's just a secondary host body, her true bodies are down in NERV and that Eva."

I nodded, because destroying a manifestation wasn't destroying the principle. "I think Julia already figured that out. By the time she went home, it was more along the lines of that she'd _told _you that she was going to be fine, with your help, but going to get _me_ of all people? She didn't want to need my help any more than you must have liked the idea of me helping her." Since an insult to someone's pride was a little more likely to get through to Jurt and his issues than Julia not wanting a kid murdered right in front of her, _especially _if, it was implied, this was happening because Jurt thought she couldn't hack it. He knew how _he'd_ react if someone thought he was so weak they needed to go get me to help him.

Jurt winced, and scowled, a habitual expression for him. I was reminded of when we were children.

"How do you want your eggs?" I asked.

"You aren't going to give me any more," condescending, "advice?"

"I dated her for a few years, and by that time she was mad enough to damn near kill me," I reminded him. "You've dated her for decades. I'm the last person you want to ask for advice." The doorbell rang and I took the bacon off the heat to answer it.

"Mister Corey, you dropped something off the balcony?" Shinji said. "I tried to throw it back up, but it wouldn't stay."

"Oh, Kaworu left that there to get your attention," I told him. "I think he used something that would work as bait for _him_." Idly, I wondered what would make good Merlin bait. Friends, obviously: a lot of beings have used them to lure me into various traps or make me go haring off into nowhere.

I'd gotten the apartment pre-furnished with a bed and a couple pieces of furniture in the spare rooms in case any of the guests wanted to spend the night, and the Broken Logrus had already figured out summoning stuff out of Shadow.

The sheer quantity of pillows swarming the floor, forming valleys and hills like the one Rei was sitting on when I opened the door was going to do horrible things to the room's acoustics, but really, that was all to the good. I had no idea why a chaos being would summon a grand piano, unless it had gotten the idea from some cartoon show, and even if I don't have my father's ear for music, I'd rather not have to listen to a teenager with more enthusiasm than sense plonking on that thing. If I didn't have access to silence spells, I might have told him to get rid of it. Then I remembered the sheet music, thought better of it and asked, "Can you play that thing?" while Shinji was greeting Rei. He seemed to have gotten the impression that she'd just run off while his back was turned the day before and was still making an effort not to hold her strange behavior against her, or to view it as just Rei being Rei instead of Rei being a broken manifestation of primal order.

Kaworu nodded.

"Freeform jazz?" I asked, thinking of Uncle Random and his preferred drum style, not to mention Cousin Martin.

"I'm fondest of classical, especially the Romantic period."

Really? That seemed a little structured. The Ways of Sawall had an extensive art collection, but most of it was what someone from Shadow Earth would have termed Modern Art, if not What Were They Smoking Art, or both. I remembered the installation of blades, a particular tree… Still, far be it from me to say that someone born at the Chaos end of things can't have an appreciation for order, a nicely written program for example.

* * *

"Ghost," I said later, sitting among the cables of the Magi in the tunnels of NERV, "should you be flirting with the little gateway to an alternate spacetime? What about the Akagis?"

"Dad!" he said, affronted, brightening and expanding into a larger circle of light. "It's not like that!"

"First question: for which is it not like that, and second, are you certain that _they _know that?"

He hung there in the air for a minute without responding.

"Name one person in our families who has managed a successful romantic relationship without doing anything stupid," I told him.

"Mandor?"

"He is married to _Aunt Fiona_."

"Luke."

"He married his half-aunt, who he didn't _know _was his half-aunt, who was carrying my child at the time, because they were affianced as kids and he didn't care enough to get out of it, while his girlfriend of several years was stuck in the body of her _half-sister_ and it really would have been no trouble at all to change the alliance marriage to her instead." All I can say is that Luke was damn lucky that Coral didn't give enough of a damn about the marriage either to feel jealous, and Nayda was too in love to react the way a demon of the pit really should have to that kind of treatment.

Coral was absolutely delighted that her sister was possessed and 'Nayda' couldn't leave since the original soul was departing the body as she entered it. Apparently the real Nayda was a bitch while the new one was a demon. Have I mentioned that demons are wonderfully sensible people?

"Come on, Ghost, you were there for this. King Random doesn't count either." Only person we knew besides Luke with a stable, loving marriage, and he was basically sentenced to it because he drove someone to suicide and it really only worked because Vialle was a very perceptive and forbearing person and Random knew exactly how much of an ass he'd been when he was younger and was determined to change.

The way I destroyed my relationship with Julia was unfortunately rather typical.

Even _Uncle Benedict _decided to sleep with the enemy because Lintra was a Hendrake and presumably good enough in battle to attract even his eye, which I wouldn't object to (far be it from me to say anything about one-night stands) except from that union eventually sprang my mother, Dara, a champion of the Logrus' vendetta against Amber. "When I was trying to think of who I could ask for romantic advice for you, the best person I could think to ask was _Aunt Flora_." Who was just as fond of her boytoys as her half-brothers were of their womanizing, except Flora could usually keep them around for a few months, and _without _bringing her status into it. It helped that she was gorgeous, but I'd long ago realized that Flora was not the airhead she painted herself as to the rest of the family. If they didn't take her seriously, then they mostly didn't try to kill her or forcibly recruit her into their bullshit drama, and she'd had enough of _that_ ages ago.

I'd annoyed the hell out of her by throwing myself on her mercies for help several times during my embarrassing phase, and it probably said something that even knowing about all my magical powers, she'd still fished around in her purse for a grenade to give me before I headed off into danger, possibly in lieu of candy or asking again if I was sure I wouldn't get lost and didn't need Auntie Flora to hold my hand.

"Point taken," Ghost said. "Do you have…" any advice, Dad, he must have started to ask hopefully, before remembering what I'd just been saying.

How _do _you tactfully make it clear to someone that you find their ideas interesting and like them as a friend, but you're not going to like them in that way and you're really hoping to whatever (hopefully not the Unicorn or Serpent, I'm starting to sympathize with Dalt burning churches) that they haven't taken an interest in you since that would be a pain in the ass that could screw up the working relationship without sounding arrogant (just assuming that someone might fall for you?) or like you'd never want to sleep with them because you secretly despise them, as opposed to just not wanting to sleep with them?

I had to go through that with Gilva, after I somehow managed to give some of the bigger gossips in the Courts of Chaos the impression that we were engaged and she would soon be my queen. Fortunately, she was in such a good mood from getting to kill all the assassins sent after her because of this that she felt she owed me a big favor anyway, and by that point she'd learned enough about my general screwed-up family situation that she could appreciate what a godsend for me it was to have a relative who didn't have any creepy designs on me. We're not _that _closely related, but after my one experience with incest (have I mentioned I don't like the Pattern?) and given how insane my family is, I'm not having any more kids with _anyone anywhere _ on my family tree.

So we became flame-siblings (the Blood of Chaos bursts into flame when exposed to the air over on that side of Shadow, which can make it a little tricky for me to feed pattern-ghosts – ended up accidently incinerating one of them), which made her Frakir's honorary aunt with spoiling rights, so that was all good.

And I think I'm going to stop there when it comes to any more discussion of who I may or may not have bedded, because I'm writing this for the same reason Corwin sat me down and told me a good chunk of the recent past (well, recent for him: a lot of it predated my birth, thanks to the time flows at the time) the first time we met. I've been told by Hyuga that Shadow Earth has a phrase for it now: learn from my fails.

However, as of the current date, my longest romantic relationship is _Julia_. Creepy stalkers don't count. Just the fact I had a creepy stalker, though?

Enough said.

If I haven't warded your mirrors, remind me. If I haven't gotten around to it because I'm too dead, ask Luke or my father or someone else with a spikard.

"I hope Aunt Flora won't mind me bothering her," said Ghost.

"Flowers and coffee," I advised. "Are there any formulas for explosives that work wherever she's staying now?" Shadow Earth's gunpowder recipe doesn't work in the Shadows near Amber: for whatever reason, it doesn't burn fast enough to act as a propellant. My father Corwin discovered that a powder used in another shadow for polishing gemstones did the trick, though. Since Flora isn't a sorcerer, if she wants to get something from another Shadow she has to Walk there instead of just summoning it, so she appreciates nephews who are willing to stop off on the way or take a few minutes to spare their aunt the trouble of running an errand, especially when coffee or military-grade ordinance are involved.

Also, I appear to have inherited my father's tendency to cockblock her by requesting trump contact or assistance getting out of a bad situation at inconvenient times, giving her a choice between telling an often-annoying relative to go to hell and getting cockblocked. After centuries of my father, the temptation to just let me get maimed was probably pretty strong on several occasions, especially since she picks up a lot of her paramours in Shadow and they tend to get freaked out about people appearing out of nowhere and then she has to find a new one.

I have one and only one blood relation who deserves to be nominated for sainthood, but of course, never trust a relative, so I fear the day I get on her last nerve. She's already given Frakir a hand: hopefully she'd be willing to do the same for Ghost.

Flora is the inverse of Benedict: Benedict is Oberon's oldest surviving son (legitimate son… that we know about…), and we all know he was certainly smart enough to see the writing on the wall. He _became _that fearsome not just out of personal inclination, but because it was the only way to survive his father and ambitious younger siblings. The more intimidated Eric, Brand and all the others were, the less likely they were to start something with him, and even Benedict might have trouble if all the others teamed up to take him down.

…Well, he _might_.

Flora was born when a good number of her older siblings were already legends, already eyeing the succession, and she's the only daughter of her mother. She had exactly zero natural allies in Castle Amber, once her mother was out of the way, and trying to become too dangerous to trifle with would have made her dangerous enough to be eliminated.

Her younger brother Random survived exactly the same way Flora did: seeming too flighty to bother with, interested more in pursuit of personal amusement than anything that mattered. Random is now the King in Amber. His sister Mirelle, well, she's dead.

Delwin and Sand, children of the next Queen, survived by getting the hell out of Amber, burying themselves so deeply in Shadow that most of the others eventually decided they were either dead or were never going to stick their necks out of whatever deep hole they'd taken refuge in. That turned out to be a rather big mistake, but I've written about that already.

"I'll see. Thanks, Dad," Ghost said, his user interface shrinking to a point of light and vanishing while I contemplated the fact that he hadn't denied that he was flirting with the living shadow whose abilities, come to think of it, were something like what I built Ghostwheel for in the first place.

I very much hope I'm not a grandfather before I'm three hundred. I still have some hope that I'll know what I'm doing by then and won't have screwed up my kids so badly that they'll screw up theirs in turn.

Probably futile, given the family history, but I went back to work in the tunnels of NERV in order to hold on to my job and my delusions.

* * *

When I came home a couple days later (I'd taken Maya's advice and moved a sleeping bag into the tunnels), there was a second raven on my computer desk. This one was white. "Well," I said, "at least someone will appreciate my cooking." I can cook college student food, courtesy of having been a college student, and standard skillet breakfasts, courtesy of hunting trips. Kaworu was either polite enough to pretend to appreciate plain eggs sunny-side-up or just had really low standards from years of lab food. Rei regarded them as fuel, while Shinji at least said thank you. Jurt just ate what I put in front of him and was too caught up in worrying to notice when a shadow crawled onto his plate and engulfed one of his strips of bacon.

I wondered if the hair ornament had left Rei's head long enough to eat anything, but since all of them were drawing on the power of raw chaos, I wasn't worried about any of them getting hungry enough to start going after Misato's pet bird or a few city blocks.

I could smell something cooking but nothing burning, and that meant that Shinji was already in the kitchen.

When he saw me he turned around and smiled sheepishly. "Do you mind? Kaworu thought you wouldn't mind, but…"

"Why would I mind?" I wondered. "Is some of that for me?" I asked, indicating the two pots and single pan. "How did you guys know I was coming home today?" I may have hoped to take Kaworu by surprise, even if he can tell when people are looking at him. Which includes Ghostwheel. Pity.

"We didn't. I, um, the stove… I wanted to try something, and I didn't look it up, and changing the ingredients changed the cook time, and it kind of splattered…"

"The idiot set fire to our kitchen," Asuka told me, appearing from the door to the room that was still spare. "Yours has been conscripted for the good of the world."

Well, since I cared about the fate of Shadow Earth, it was probably a good thing to keep the pilots well-fed and not dead of food poisoning from sushi that had been sitting out on convenience store shelves all day. "Asuka, as a fellow college graduate, I'm sure you can guess the most important question here," I said, holding up a finger, pointed at Shinji. "Do I get free food out of this?"

"Of course, Mister Corey!" he said, almost taken aback by the idea of _not _feeding anyone within range who might possibly be willing to try his concoctions. Maybe he expected me to be daunted by the revelation of possible latent pyromaniac tendencies?

"I'll bring a fire extinguisher and protective gear from work," I decided. "Goggles first. Can't have you losing an eye to a grease splatter." I looked around. "Are Rei and Kaworu here?"

"Ayana-Rei," Shinji corrected himself. "She really likes miso soup." Since he was the person making miso soup around here, that probably explained the happy blush. "So we're out of green onions again, and Kaworu thought we should pick up more miso, and a few more things, and he wanted to go for a walk."

Take the children for a walk, I translated. Since Rei seemed to have adopted the hair ribbon, or at least agreed to let the hair ribbon be her bodyguard in case anyone_ else_ tried to sacrifice her in order to rescue their loved ones from death, she probably knew that they existed and were alive.

"And we're out of bacon again, because Asuka and Touji are training the birds to sit on their shoulders," Shinji remembered. "I don't know what Rei and Kaworu are doing with their slices…"

The vegetarians? Probably feeding them to the Bottomless Pit and the Hair Ribbon of Doom.

"It must be that stray dog," Asuka reminded him. "Those two need to stop caving for anything that looks pitiful… it's going to get fat!"

Even if Jurt didn't have my talent for sorcery and had barely survived walking the Logrus, summoning your own food from Shadow was a parlor trick. Normally I wouldn't have cared: it might even have been a relief that my half-brother wasn't as concerned about his pride and dignity anymore, enough to play a role and have some laughs, but seriously, was he caging bacon from Rei, after killing her last body and destroying her memories from ages about seven to fourteen? That struck me as pretty low: he didn't have any right to ask her for favors after doing something like that.

Couldn't see Kaworu feeding him either… unless he was just a soft touch. I might resemble that remark somewhat.

And, judging from the way Shinji was avoiding Asuka's eyes, maybe she was wrong about who exactly was feeding Jurt people food.

Shinji was a good kid.

Which meant I really shouldn't take him to walk the Pattern. Vialle and Uncle Random would do what they could, but he'd get eaten _alive_. Just like what NERV would have done to him if Gendo hadn't been vanished into some deep, dark hole by whatever clandestine agency Kaji drew one of his paychecks from.

Still, if the white raven was found, that left one more angel to go. One more angel and a few weeks more of spellwork to identify and annihilate anyone attempting to trigger an impact before it got far enough along to pull anyone else in.

It wasn't that Julia wasn't an inventive mage: growing up on Shadow Earth meant that _all _magic was new and exciting to her, and she had a lot of outside the box ideas. It was that normally, her inventiveness ran more to pranks and reverse engineering spells to turn people trying to kill me into coat racks instead of anything fatal.

I got the feeling that some of the things she was rigging up for Kaworu, or Adam, if he decided to double-cross us and finish the job of Second Impact by finishing off Shadow Earth were channeling Jurt-related aggression.

Of course, the fact that she was taking it out on a potential someone else as opposed to the boyfriend who had risked her home Shadow's survival probably meant she'd already forgiven him to whatever degree.

Once the last stray angel was accounted for, I did need to get back to the Courts. It would be good if Jurt and Julia were back together by then so they could take it from there, but it wasn't like I could be much help.

Then I realized that Jurt had _another _half-brother. Who had just bagged his first crush, one of the most powerful and dangerous-when-annoyed sorceresses on either end of Shadow. And they were still on their honeymoon: weren't people at that stage of things feeling magnanimous and inclined to share the good fortune?

I might have gone into my room and pulled out Mandor's trump right then, but I was a little better at thinking ahead now that I had been back in the day, so my survival instinct managed to connect the dots between _honeymoon _and _remember all those times you've accidentally cockblocked Aunt Flora by trumping her at the wrong time? What do you think Mandor and Aunt Fiona would do to you? _

Besides make me sweat for a few decades, give me time to get really paranoid?

_Jurt _could contact Mandor. Just had to figure out how to nudge him into it…

* * *

_You have _no idea _how unbelievably tempted I have been to do some kind of omake with Frakir and manga!Kaworu. She's a living weapon, she's not going to feel bad about granting his request and mercy killing him the way Shinji did. _

'_Will you remember me?'_

'_Yes: I will absolutely remember adding a godlike alien to my kill count, don't worry about that.'_

_The sad thing is, he'd be happy with even that much. Sadamoto is Sadistmoto. _

_But yes, I am declaring this fic over, I mean it this time. I wrote something like 4,500 words with Misato and Kaji, but it was too much infodump even by the standards of this fic. If anyone wants to read it, I can put it up on tumblr or something. _


End file.
